Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304080178
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LYNN ELBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
FILM DETAILS NAZI WAR ON MODERN ART
Shine a light on yet another dark corner of Nazi Germany and be reminded how many ways a brutal society destroys the best of itself and its people."Degenerate Art," a compelling new PBS documentary, chronicles Adolf Hitler's successful effort to crush Germany's vibrant modern art movement and replace it with the culture of war.
The title of the film refers to an infamous 1937 Nazi art exhibit of the same name - in German, "Entartete Kunst."
It was a smirking, belittling presentation of some of Germany and Europe's finest artists, including Max Beckmann, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
Paintings were hung in crowded, poorly lighted rooms. Some works were crooked, some upside down. Derisive graffiti was scrawled on the wall: "Crazy at any price," "An insult to German womanhood."
"The common person walked into the Degenerate Art show . . . as a horror show, a side show. The stuff on the wall was the work of madmen," says cultural historian Sander Gilman in the documentary.
Seen by more than 3 million people as it traveled Germany and Austria, the Entartete Kunst show was part of a full-scale attack on the modern imagination, according to filmmaker David Grubin.
Modernism sought to look beyond the superficial, painting not the skin but the "bones and the sinews," as Gilman puts it. It encouraged a critical view that was clearly dangerous to a totalitarian system.
"We forget art has power. Hitler was paying tribute to art - he knew art was dangerous. It makes you think," Grubin said in an interview from New York.
For Hitler, himself a failed painter, the boundaries of true art were narrow and classical: "bulls and Greeks and naked broads," says Robert Hughes, art critic for Time magazine.
It could also be militaristic, serving Hitler's aim of preparing his nation for battle.
His love of war was born, in part, of his World War I soldiering experience. The same terrible conflict helped create the defiant, disillusioned modern artists.
Hitler's quest to destroy modernism in painting, literature, music and film was carried out by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.
"The Fuhrer loves art, because he himself is an artist," a nearly evangelical Goebbels tells a crowd in fascinating archival film. "Under his blessed hand, a renaissance has begun. I cry out, oh century, oh arts! What a joy to be alive!"
There was method in the Nazi madness, and the suppression of arts was systematic. So was the attack on the artists themselves, hauntingly depicted by Grubin.
Beckmann, at one time among Germany's most honored painters, heard a Hitler radio speech promising that all the "chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."
The artist and wife quietly packed and slipped out of Berlin, never to return. Otto Dix hid in a far corner of Germany and painted only safe landscapes - "tantamount to immigration," he called it.
One artist was a suicide. Another, propelled by the fear of becoming a concentration camp victim, destroyed his works.
Ultimately, of course, millions of people died in the camps. Years before, writer Heinrich Heine had warned: "Where books are burned, people will be burned."
Grubin's film was made in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which organized a 1991 exhibit on the Entartete Kunst that included a partial reconstruction of its displays.
Drawing on research by museum curator Stephanie Barron, the film presents touching interviews with German witnesses and relatives of the artists. Hughes' pungent observations make the art, and the losses, vivid.
The narrator is David McCullough, who brings the same simple, resonant elegance that so enriched PBS' "The Civil War" documentary.
The Los Angeles museum exhibit two years ago sparked angry comparisons of Nazi censorship with the battle over National Endowment for the Arts funding of controversial artists.
But Grubin calls it a mistake to draw such a parallel: "You can't compare (conservative U.S. senator) Jesse Helms and Joseph Goebbels."
"I would rather say that people can use art for political ends. I think that's what Jesse Helms does when he holds up art he doesn't like. It's to advance his own political aims."
"Degenerate Art" airs tonight at 10 on WBRA (Channel 15).